Workbasket - Oops, I Did it Again * On Pens & Needles

WIPs:

Starting over, for whatever reason, is kinda my thing. Our knitting group even has a name for it… “Doing a Lorri”. True to form, project s were frogged and started over.

The shrug is an easy pattern to knit. The yarn is slippery. Stitches drop off quickly, then run away equally as fast. When learning new patterns there is always a learning curve. Add in the learning curve for a couple of new tools and errors happen. For me, at a certain point the cumulative errors causes my anxiety to go higher and higher. Eventually it just feels a relief to pull it all out and start again. Pulling it out with the beads was different. It wasn’t difficult and the yarn didn’t knot. The beads just POPPED off and went everywhere. To combat having to pick up lots of really small beads, I put the knitting with beads into a zip top bag. Gently holding the top closed, so the yarn could be pulled slowly out, it was easy peasy. Winding the yarn back around the ball while collecting the beads in the bottom of the zip bag. Using a provisional cast on, I began again.

The cowl wasn’t causing anxiety at all. Progress was coming along nicely. While being a passenger in the car I was knitting along when an idea flew into my brain. “I could use all of the yarns to make a diagonal sorta pattern as the cowl goes down, getting bigger and bigger”. Delighted with my new idea, I frogged the cowl while winding up each color on it’s own ball. Clearly I had not thought this through… at all. It didn’t take very far into the cast on row to realize that my idea wouldn’t work like I thought it would. Dang it. Back to the original plan, much further from the finish line than I started the day with. The first time that I started this project, I hadn’t noticed that there is an 8 row garter stitch border at the neck edge. The second time, I made sure that I did the garter stitch border. I wasn’t happy with it. I liked how it rolled before… I frogged it again. (the 3rd time is the charm, is’t it?) When I got to the end of the first color, I asked DW to pick the color that he thought would look nice to go next. He picked the one with lots of orange. It wasn’t what I would have picked (because I am super boring), but that was exactly the point. I think it looks pretty good so far.

I had put the Harry Potter blanket project on a soft hold. The sewing part was going fantastically, but then I started to worry about if the coffee stain would actually come out.

coffee stain in the upper right side of photo

I figured that I had better pause to make a serious attempt to get the stain out. I purchased some Oxiclean powder and a squeeze bottle. I made the concentration as strong as I could get, by dissolving as much powder as the water would hold. Saturating the stains, they were left to do its magic. There was not any magic. Consulting Google led me to Oxiclean Max force stain remover (which I already had). Blotting the stain dry-ish and re-saturating the stains with the Max force, again it was left for magic to happen. Checking again at bedtime, it looked as if the stain had lightened, but I wasn’t really sure. On the way to bed it was tossed it into the washing machine with another scoop of powder. (not starting the machine at this time, because DW is a super light sleeper) The next morning it was run through a gentle cold cycle and then hung up to dry. The stains are much lightened but not entirely gone.

I think they are light enough to bother me less. The other solution would be to take it apart and frog it to the point where I can re-knit the stained part with new, clean yarn. I really (really-really) do not want to go there.

Remember this project:

Well, when I attempted to sew the knit blanket to the fabric backing using the quilt frame and electric sewing machine, I had to take the 12 days of Christmas quilt off the frame.

This left that Christmas quilt teetering on the edge of falling into the UFO pile. Then I had a whole weekend of unsupervised free time. 😀 I was determined to make some progress on this project. I replaced it on the frame, used the template and white marking pencil to trace the holly leaves quilting pattern, and commenced sewing. After all day, both days, this is what I have to show for it:

Recently, I managed to get to work without a knitting project. Thankfully the “Dolly Dearest” project was in my car. The little socks were super easy and fast to work up flat.

I had to wait until I got home to sew them up, because of not having a sewing needle with a large enough eye. So I just left them on the cable.

The socks were ridiculously small. I was certain that they wouldn’t fit on either of the dolls. Up until now, I really hadn’t looked closely at the dolls. Checking out the feet of one, I noticed she had thick calves. (Oh no, this little bitty sock is so not going to fit!)